Alright, so check this out. Highpoint provides a means to flash the bios of the raid card through DOS. Copied the files on my USBDOS Flash drive and loaded them up. Went back into the pre-OS Raid BIOS Prompt (Ctrl+H) and my options didn't change.
Apparently what Highpoint was mentioning when turning off the INT13/EDBA was actually flasher utility that creates a customized bios file from the stock version downloaded off of their website.
The bios file comes with a flasher called hptflash.exe which will then allow me to create the custom .v25 file I want to flash. Mind you these features are not available for enable/disable through any other means.
This is kind of backwards considering (those w/ a Windows setup) that you have to get into the OS, install the drivers for the OS to recognize the card's presence, then run the hptflash and make your file. Then flash the card outside of windows and hope that it doesn't interfere with your mobo's raid scheme.
In my case, I had a fresh install of windows that I could not access b/c the card was blocking the setup. So I had to install the OS on a singular drive to flash the card with the correct customized bios.
Now that everything is good to go on the card end, I will probably have to re-install the OS once I get it to work in RAID 1 as well :/. I wonder if a pricier would have made me waste so much time? Learning all this and going through this oddly ordered process has, undoubtedly, cost me more than the price difference is worth.
Oh well, now I know and can share my battle scares with the world
. Thanks for the help guys!